+1 on this. Honestly, I’ve used Pro Tools on Mac and PC, and Ardour on Linux. Tried Elements when I made the 32 to 64 bit jump without wanting to shell out for Pro Tools again. As much as it saddens me to say, Linux for pro audio is a non-starter, in my opinion. With Cubase, I sort of just got it and was impressed with the MIDI feature set. And once I got it, it was hard to switch to anything else. I still have to use Pro Tools at other studios, but for my production needs, Cubase suits me better. Now I’m on Cubase Pro and I don’t see myself shopping around. The grass is not greener on the other side. The learning curve of any other DAW is enough to keep me locked into Cubase for the foreseeable future.
I like it because of my custom keyboard shortcuts and macros with custom logical editor presets. I went many years without using this powerful part of Cubase. You need this to get the most out of Cubase.
- I’ve tried fl studio/ableton/logic/pro tools
- cubase is most balanced DAW in my opinion
- its MIDI capabilities are incredible
- routing is intuitive and organised
- sound quality and audio engine amazing
- other DAW are joke compared to cubase/nuendo
but at the end of day doesn’t really matter as long as you making music
i own ableton studio one logic and cubase
ableton for live work but midi sux on it
logic blows chunks
studio one i’ve just started using properly but i’m beginning to like it a lot more than cubase… the drag and drop approach to S1 is an absolute dream it still needs a bit of catching up getting the outside world in which is where cubase beats it … cubase has gotten so bloated of late and it does a lot of poop but it’s getting too much for what i do…
in order to do what i want alot of features score /comping/monitor mixers are really lost on me and S1’s single window UI is the way it should be done
MixBus and Reaper, neither I particularly like but they handle vastly larger projects than Cubase without maxing out my CPU.
Why do I like Cubase? I’ve used it since the days it was just a MIDI sequencer! So familiarity, anything I hear in my head I know I can find a way of translating it into music.
I was on the edge on dumping Cubase but the last 8.5.20 patch cured some of my CPU woes introduced since version 7. CB9 seems to be behaving itself too. But I still run out of CPU - which I simply do not on Reaper or Mixbus. At least it’s usable for me now which is a big relief.
I have used but not owned Pro Tools, Logic and Mixbus.
I hated Pro Tools and Logic. Mixbus was interesting but not for me. Cubase I know so well and is second nature when writing that I could not contemplate changing. We are like an old married couple who have the occasional disagreement, but have long since come to terms with each others flaws.
Started in 1992 with Sequencer plus gold, then digital voyetra, then cakewalk and when SX1 came out I ditch my cracked copy of vst 3.7xx, since then tried protools at a friend studio more then once all these years, logic pro, tracktion but always sticked with cubase due investment of money and time.
What I do, I can do with any DAW, but finding it often to much time involved to get to the bottom of each DAW at the same deep level as I can go with cubase.
I’ve tried Studio One and Samplitude for a while. I still do the majority of my composing in Ableton Live, but for recording vocals and heavy duty mixing, you’d have to pry Cubase from my cold dead hands. It’s rock solid stable for me, offers much better latency times for monitoring than Studio One did on my system, and has a lot of really great features that minimize the stress of editing and mixing.
Studio One does a lot of little things faster and easier than Cubase. Things you would compare to walking or breathing in a DAW, S1 has a clear advantage over Cubase. But the kind of detailed work that you’d compare to, like, a headstand or walking a tight rope, Cubase offers clearly better solutions for this sort of stuff in my opinion.
So I put up with, for instance, rightclick>add new send>select track type and plugin to add a new send, whereas in Studio One I’d just drag a plugin into the send rack of another track. And that’s fine because in exchange I get things like track versions and slip editing,
When I first was getting into DAW recording I was looking at Cubase, Cakewalk Sonar, Pro Tools Logic and Cubase. I was about to purchase Logic then Apple bought them out. Though Apple said they were going to continue to support PC users I knew that was NOT going to happen and it didn’t, after a year they dropped all support for PC. As a matter of fact I remember Steinberg had a very nice cross platform pricing for those poor PC users that were abandoned by Logic. (:
Protools was just out of my pricerange and required the hardware interface so the decision was between Cubase and Sonar. Went w/ Cubase SX because they were the first DAW at the time to fully utilize hyper threading technology and the new DAW I just built was using the new intel hyper-threading processor.
Though I think Cubase is a fair value, I personally am not just dedicated to Cubase I also use Vegas Pro to do audio. If Steinberg gets lazy and lets another DAW out do them w/ more stability, better value and USABLE features I’d go with them in a heartbeat.
I use Sony Vegas Pro to mix my video audio because Cubase doesn’t have an auto align feature that aligns audio from different recording sources. Vegas works w/ a program called Plural Eyes that can align audio clips and tracks so I don’t have to go thru the tedious task of going thru each clip and manually aligning wave forms which is a royal PITA.
I haven’t tried Apple based DAWs since I never owned a Mac (and never will). Tested demo versions of Reaper and Studio 1 but got bored real fast. Been using Cubase since SX3 and never bought nothing else. Simply put, Cubase is built in a way that perfectly fits my needs and all tools are were I would have put them so a very natural feel for me.
Now I use Pro 9 to compose and Nuendo 7 to finalize and master.